I was just hanging out in Barnes and Noble, as I do way too often, when I heard a mother and daughter trying to figure out which test prep book to go with for the SAT.

Don’t get me wrong—I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop. But they weren’t exactly whispering :)

They were looking at two Kaplan books because the mother had heard of Kaplan, so she assumed they must have the best materials. (Never mind that Kaplan published its first book for the new SAT without ever actually looking at the test . . .

full text: Grueling Test Prep Misses The Point

One complaint you often hear about standardized tests is that they’re racist or sexist. The complaint is usually framed this way:

The average score of group X is higher than the average score of group Y, so the test must be biased against group Y in favor of group X.

This argument is used to show that standardized tests are skewed in favor of men over women, or in favor of whites over blacks and latinos, or in favor of asians over whites, or in favor of northerners over southerners, or who knows what. (Here’s an example of the argument being applied to the “gender gap” on the SAT, from FairTest.org: http://www.fairtest.org/facts/genderbias.htm)

It’s certainly true that a standardized test can be racist or sexist by design. It’s also true that previous versions of the SAT, in particular, included racist and sexist test items.

But the major standardized tests have been changed many times in the past few decades, and no credible argument can be made that the tests are still racist or sexist in themselves . . .

full text: Discrimination in Standardized Tests

A student recently sent me an email that included the following:

Thanks again for your help. I took the LSAT twice (with a two-year stint in the Peace Corps somewhere in between). The first time I prepared with a Kaplan course. The second time I took a Testmasters course and used some Powerscore materials to prepare for the test. In the end, I thought Kaplan was a complete waste of time

 . . .

full text: Making a Thousand-Dollar Mistake

Today I had originally planned to do a post on guessing strategies for the LSAT to complement my earlier article on guessing strategies for the SAT. But an article that appeared on American.com on Friday has forced me to pre-empt that post . . .

full text: Keep The SAT

My recent post on an article I found about the Princeton Review included a passing remark that the SAT punishes guessing, rather than rewarding it.

This drew a posted comment from one reader, and several emails from other readers, asking for clarification. (By the way–while I welcome all remarks and comments in any form, it’d be great if you’d consider posting comments to the blog directly. That way everybody can benefit from your ideas.)

So I’ve decided to do a series of blog posts on the role of guessing in each of the standardized tests I cover. We’ll start with the SAT today . . .

full text: SAT Guessing Strategy: The Real Deal

While I was researching a recent post on the race and gender gaps in the SAT, I came across this 2003 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/03239/215443.stm

It discusses some of the points I’ll be making in my post.  But I was very surprised by . . .

full text: Ohhhh . . . Princeton Review. Now I get it.

I used to love the SAT, back before 2005.  It was a pretty honest test then.  I could defend it whenever people attacked it (which was all the time), because every question was legitimate.  I even remember the analogies fondly—I had a way to solve them that took advantage of the test’s rules and patterns and didn’t require you to study vocabulary.

Sigh.  Memories.

Unfortunately, the current version of the SAT just . . .

full text: The SAT’s Grammatical Inconsistencies